Page 39 of British Bratva: A Russian Mafia Romance

“Breathe out when you squeeze the trigger. Nice and slow.”

I nodded once, and curled my finger feeling the mechanism connect.

With the silencer on the end of the gun, the whispered shots came out with far more force than I was expecting, and it would have knocked my arm if Max hadn’t been there holding me steady, absorbing the shock.

He stepped back, and I watched the blood blossom from the twin wounds I’d made in the middle of Pierce’s forehead. When I breathed out, I felt nothing but a sense of relief.

Suddenly I was all too aware of the weight of the gun, and my hand dropped down to my side.

Max took it off me, and I was glad to give it to him.

“He’s gone.”

Nothing else mattered now. I was prepared for whatever consequences I’d have to face. I’d show the world exactly how he’d driven me to it. But I had no idea what came immediately next.

“Yes,” said Max. “He’s gone.” His tone was low and neutral, but there was a tightness to his voice that I didn’t understand.

In what seemed like a single motion, Max holstered his gun and lifted me into his arms, bundling me in the folds of his coat, as he carried me like some kind of princess right out of the door he’d barrelled his way in through.

CHAPTER 16

Maxim

Sutherland’s death wasn’t supposed to go down like that.

It should have been a clean extraction, time to interrogate him thoroughly before the kill shot came. I had plans for making him regret all he’d ever done to Elizabeth. The professional in me would have never killed him there. It wasn’t even close to the hit I’d planned, but I couldn’t have done anything other than rush in and stop him. It was all inevitable right from the moment he pulled up outside the house.

The only thing I hadn’t predicted was Elizabeth wanting to pull the trigger herself.

As soon as it was done, I knew I had to get her out of there.

I knew this city from its rooftops and its gutters. I’d seen all the parts of it that most Londoners chose to ignore and I knew none of them were better than me. I did my duty, made my sacrifice in other people’s blood. No questions asked. My soul was already long black, so another face in the shadows to keep me up at night made no difference at all.

She was different. She didn’t need to be involved in the clean up.

I had a car ready for her in minutes and bundled her into the back of it. Sergei was a loyal driver, never far away when he was needed.

The card I gave her now was nearly identical to the one I’d given her at the gym, only instead of my name, this one said MT Professional Security Services, and on the back was an address in Knightsbridge in a single neat line.

If she’d been keeping up with Sutherland’s work, she might have recognised the address as one of the buildings he’d been looking into. It was Bratva property, and all of us could do without anybody finding that out.

I felt nothing when I dug the bullets out of Sutherland’s skull and counted the shell casings, making sure there were enough to match the entry wounds, that each one in had a corresponding way out.

You needed a crematorium or a furnace to burn a body to ash. A domestic house fire wouldn’t get hot enough to get through the layers of fat, to char the bone. But it would do for the blood on the carpet, once I’d doused the area with the contents of the man’s liquor cabinet.

The body needed to come out of the house.

After all the years I’d been doing this, I knew two things. Nobody ever wanted to get involved, and, most of the time they couldn’t tell you what they were looking at even when it was right in front of them. People had too much going on in their lives to care what anybody else was getting up to, as long as it looked broadly fine.

As counter-intuitive as it was, the best thing for me to do with Sutherland was to bandage the gunshots to prevent more oozing and stuff him into his overcoat before the rigor set in. Better than rolling him up in a carpet and dragging him out, provoking all kinds of questions about removals in the middle of the night and the distinct, lumpen shape of his dead-weight, would be best to put a hat on his head and walk him over the road with my arm under his shoulders, as though he was too inebriated to hold himself up. I had the strength for it, and the stomach. And that was exactly what I did.

At this time of night, we weren’t worth a second glance. The street was empty, all the curtain-twitchers long gone to bed. I took the elevator up to the middle floor of the apartments opposite rather than risking trailing blood up the stairs.

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